Cross Reality in Crisis Management

Introduction

Emergency and disasters can strike anytime, damaging infrastructures and inflicting human casualties. Therefore, it is essential for every stakeholder, including firefighters, police, first-aiders, healthcare staff in the emergency department, and emergency response engineers, to respond to the incidents systematically and efficiently. To achieve this, the readiness and the efficient collaboration of the emergency response teams in responding to crises, such as fire and earthquake, are critical. Normally, organizations would develop emergency response procedures and disaster management plans to guide their crisis response teams to settle the crisis. A big assumption behind these plans is that every individual could follow the guidelines and react correctly under stress. However, human history told us that this assumption is not valid (Kwok et al., 2020). In particular, Robert and Lajtha (2002) specified that “the key to effective crisis management lies not so much with the writing of detailed manuals (that have a low likelihood of being used, and an even lower likelihood of being useful)”. Also, it is not surprising that humans would make mistakes during emergency incidents, leading to more severe consequences. Therefore, organizations should provide regular training and practical onsite guidance to their emergency response teams to equip each staff with the capabilities, flexibility, and confidence to handle sudden and unexpected events (Robert & Lajtha, 2002).

Crisis management is the actions that are taken to prevent or lessen the impact of a crisis. Crisis management involves three phases: pre-crisis (preparation), crisis response, and post-crisis (recovery) (Coombs & Laufer, 2018). Each phase requires tight and rapid coordination among different stakeholders and departments. For this reason, the use of cross reality (XR) concept, which emphasizes the collaboration of virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), and augmented reality (AR) under a shared online virtual world (Paradiso & Landay, 2009), in the crisis management training can produce a marked effect in the following aspects:

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  VR technology can provide an immersive environment for emergency response staff to familiarise themselves with their roles and responsibilities (e.g., Smolentsev et al., 2017).

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  AR technology can provide emergency response staff with onsite guidance on the rescue plan and the best rescue routes (e.g., Tsai et al., 2012).

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  MR technology can show emergency response engineers the present damage situation and then offer them guidance for assessing, repairing, and rebuilding the infrastructures to restore the situation to normal (e.g., Espíndola et al., 2013).

Because of these reasons, this chapter studied the possibilities of using XR technology in crisis management. It should contribute to the field of research in VR, XR, and crisis management (an essential component of healthcare) in the following four ways:

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  The potential of using XR technology in crisis management has not yet been exploited. This study is novel in proposing a framework to adopt XR technology in crisis management.

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  It is one of the few studies which connects VR, AR, and MR for one purpose: to manage the crisis.

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  It presents a study to examine the user perception of the XR-based crisis management method.

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  It discusses the challenges of using XR in crisis management based on the study results and provides insights for the management to better use the technology.